University researchers from around the country today received nearly $5 million from the National Science Foundation to help them run their high-performance projects on the Google-IBMCloud Computing University Initiative infrastructure.

Opscode, Inc., a cloud infrastructure company led by veterans of the data center teams from Amazon and Microsoft, has closed a Series A funding round of $2.5 million led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the company said today.

The U.S. Patent Office has awarded Google a patent for its proposal for a floating data center that uses the ocean to provide power and cooling. Google’s patent application was filed in Feb. 2007, published in October 2008 and approved on Tuesday (and quickly noted by SEO by the Sea).

Now that content delivery network Limelight Networks (LLNW) has the upper hand in its patent war with larger rival Akamai Technologies, one theory is that Limelight is more likely to become an acquisition target.

Compliance and regulatory concerns are often voiced when it comes to Cloud Computing, and often many of the interesting types of applications organisations would like to deploy to the cloud are often those governed by some form of regulatory standard. Lets look in more details at one of these.

Amazon.com has announced a grant program that offers academia free access to its cloud services. The program, titled AWS in Education, offers $100 per student worth of free usage of its services, but only to courses and academics approved by Amazon.

AWS in Education program is designed to allow the academic community to take advantage of the Amazon Web Services for teaching and for research. Educators, academic researchers, students, and student entrepreneurs from all over the world can apply for free AWS usage credits in the form of teaching grants, research grants, and project grants. Read on to learn more about what we've put together.

podcast hosted by Mike Vizard, Aster Data CEO Mayank Bawa talks about how the rise of the open-source Hadoop framework is going to fundamentally change the way IT organizations think about building data warehouse systems.

Here in the Distribution Technologies team for BBC A&M Interactive, we look at how best to distribute media and metadata across A&M for current and future platforms; we also look at how to syndicate our content to external partnerships and the public.